How Do You Solve A Problem Like Elon?

The United States government is not a Silicon Valley start-up.

Will Elon Musk do to the federal government what he did 25 years ago to his McLaren F1?

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Thomas E. Ricks.

Recently I ran into someone who has known Elon Musk for decades. He told me that one of the best ways to understand Musk was to read The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, by Jimmy Soni. I felt weary of Silicon Valley oligarchs and had no interest in the history of that particular company. But dutifully, I bought the book and skimmed it for whatever I could learn about our new deputy president.

Here's the money quote: “He’s obviously completely crazy, but he’s really, really smart.” That’s from Max Levchin, a co-founder of the company. A good part of the rest of the book is an explication of what Levchin meant.

• Musk is portrayed as impatient, aggressive and surprisingly reckless. In 2000 he was at the wheel of his McLaren F1, driving Peter Theil, another PayPal co-founder, to a business meeting in Menlo Park, when Theil asked him how fast the car could go. Musk floored it and flew off Sand Hill Road, wrecking the million-dollar sports car.

• In business as well, Musk prefers speed to planning. Meg Whitman, who was chief executive of eBay from 1998 to 2008, described PayPal as “a company of extremely aggressive people with a real bias for action.”

• Federal employees won’t be shocked to learn Musk was never a big believer in employee happiness as a measure of success. Soni quotes him saying, “You can have a ship that has everything buttoned down. The sails are full. Morale is great. Everyone’s cheering. And it’s heading straight for the reef.” PayPal employees gave up family time, sunshine, and sleep. Yet engineers especially liked working for him.

• In May 2000, Soni writes, Musk “led an overthrow of his CEO.” Several months later, after employees compiled a petition calling for Musk’s removal, he in turn was ousted from the same position. Musk was overseas on his honeymoon when his board decided that, like those employees, it lacked confidence in his leadership. Musk reacted with a curious lack of Trumpian vindictiveness. “He does not hold grudges,” Levchin said, adding that Musk was “remarkably gracious” about the firing.

Musk and his ilk hit upon a formula for success in rapidly changing business environments. That formula of quick, aggressive risk-taking is no way to run a stable democracy that was designed by James Madison and others to disperse power and force compromise. (It’s also no way to run a maturing business enterprise. My editor Timothy Noah interjects here to recommend his 2023 essay, “How Corporate America’s Obsession With Creativity Wrecked the World And Brought Us Elon Musk,” which draws on Samuel W. Franklin’s under-appreciated 2023 book, The Cult of Creativity: A Surprisingly Recent History.)

America is not a start-up, but Musk is treating it like one. The best thing for the country, I think, is to slow him down as much as possible, throwing obstacles in his way at every step. The clock for next year’s congressional mid-term elections already is ticking. The question is how fast that goes. Neither time nor the Madisonian system is on Musk’s side; I doubt Musk understands American history well enough to grasp that. The old saying is that the fatal flaw of the successful autodidact is that he knows well what he knows, but often is quite unaware of what he does not know. That may be the case here.

There is more to read about the man. I am told that Walter Isaacson’s biography of him is very good. But I lack the patience to spend that much time with Musk.